Publications

The archaeology of war has often focused on combatants and weaponry, prioritising the conflicts themselves over their aftermath. Yet in today’s world, with ongoing and emerging wars, archaeology must also address the precarity and long-term consequences of armed conflict for all parties involved. This edited volume examines how the short- and long-term impacts of warfare appear in the archaeological record from prehistory to the medieval period. For the defeated, consequences may include poor diet, ill-health, physical trauma, and higher mortality – visible in bioarchaeological evidence. Victorious communities may benefit from plundered resources, leading to wealth and improved living conditions. Conflicts can also trigger migrations, whether through forced displacement or deportation, well-documented in historical texts but harder to trace in periods without written records. Finally, warfare can leave settlements and landscapes destroyed, rendering them less hospitable. Understanding the trauma of war requires examining its corporeal and material dimensions. This volume explores who gains and who suffers in the wake of conflict, through case studies from prehistoric Iberia, ancient Egypt and Nubia, Roman Britain and Pannonia, the Middle Danube “Barbaricum”, the Late Antique Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, Viking Scandinavia, and medieval Anatolia.

This paper investigates the frequency of commentary pragmatic markers in Ghanaian and Ugandan Englishes, and their use across different text categories, using the Ghanaian and Ugandan components of the International Corpus of English. These markers, which are grouped into assessment, emphasis, evidential, hearsay and manner-of-speaking markers, are explored from a variational pragmatic approach. The results show that Ghanaian English users employ an overall higher frequency of commentary pragmatic markers than Ugandan English users. Ghanaian English users utilise more commentary pragmatic markers in private and public dialogues and printed writing than Ugandan English users, while the latter employ more commentary pragmatic markers in monologues than their Ghanaian English counterparts. The study confirms the influence of local African languages and cultures on the use of some English commentary pragmatic markers, thus contributing to the research on nativisation and pragmatic variation in these varieties.

The De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Health and Society explores how digitalization is reconfiguring practices of health and medicine. Digitalisation requires health and medical practices to address and utilise the interrelated challenges posed by increased quantification (e.g., data-intensive medicine), ubiquitous connectivity (e.g., remote access to care providers), and the unprecedented power of algorithms (e.g., communicative AI). Developing important social scientific analyses of the contemporary sociotechnical configuration of health knowledge, therapeutic relationships and medical decision-making, the handbook puts forward theories and methods to inform the development, implementation and governance of Digital Health. It will therefore be an invaluable resource for shaping desirable futures in health and care.

Many socio-economic systems require positive economic growth rates to function properly. These growth dependencies pose serious challenges given uncertainty about future growth rates and the role of economic growth as a driver of environmental crises. Thus, identifying and transforming socio-economic systems that currently rely on growth for their adequate functioning is a crucial step towards effective sustainability transformations. To facilitate conceptual clarity, we propose a general definition and framework for operationalizing the concept of “growth dependence” through four elements: (1) the system under investigation, (2) the unit of growth measurement, (3) the meaning of “growth”, and (4) the functions or properties of the system relevant for human well-being. We illustrate the impact of varieties in definitions on assessment outcomes by applying the framework to areas widely seen as growth-dependent: labor markets, social insurance and public finance. Our framework helps researchers to develop a more coherent understanding of growth dependence, a prerequisite for assessing policy options towards growth independence.

Digital transformation is widely promoted as a solution to healthcare chal-lenges such as ageing populations, chronic diseases and pandemics. This has led to rapid advances in the field of digital health, driven primarily by the computer and health sciences, which are developing devices and interventions. However, digital transformation in healthcare is not always easy to implement. Repeated calls for digi-tal transformation and their technology-centric solutions fail to adequately address issues of implementation, adoption and unintended consequences. What is over-looked is the factor that moderates digital transformation, namely the society in which it takes place. It is important to recognise that society and social practices are not simply passive objects that can be transformed in a linear way. Instead, they are reflexive and responsive to experimentation and intervention. Designing and manag-ing digital transformation in healthcare therefore requires an understanding of soci-ety. The Handbook of Digital Health and Societybrings together leading social science perspectives – from sociology, media studies, STS, psychology, philosophy, political science and more – to explore the complex relationship between technology and soci-ety, and to shed light on the conditions under which digital transformation can be successful, ethical and deliver social value. The Handbook thus complements the dom-inant disciplines in the field of digital health and provides essential guidance for envi-sioning and developing appropriate and desirable solutions to current healthcare challenges.

This article examines the evolving climate policy stance of the International Monetary Fund (hereafter the IMF or the Fund), highlighting an evolution towards greater acceptance of climate policy, as well as tensions between its expanded green rhetoric and the practical constraints of its fiscal mandate. Using document analysis and, for contextualisation, a handful of semi-structured interviews with IMF officials, we argue that, in the post-pandemic period, the Fund has expanded the ambitious climate rhetoric it had adopted shortly before the pandemic. However, we also provide evidence from different types of IMF loan arrangements to show that the translation of these commitments into substantive policy advice into lending operations has remained uneven at best. The IMF’s increasing emphasis on the macro-criticality of climate change has been implemented more systematically under the new, climate-sensitive Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF) than under standard loan facilities. While the IMF’s capacity to marry fiscal stability with climate action in operations varies with the type of loan instrument deployed, our analysis suggests that the Fund has layered climate concerns onto an otherwise largely unchanged neoliberal toolbox. As a result, its ‘climate turn’ has been no more than a half-turn, grounded in an embrace of green neoliberalism.

In Zambia, religious nationalists exploit legal and policy ambiguities to construct abortion and LGBTI+ rights as un-Zambian and un-Christian. This delegitimization narrows the scope of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) to family planning. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with Zambian stakeholders and international aid officials, we argue that while these ambiguities constrain reproductive justice, they also allow activists to advance SRHR by building coalitions that connect advocacy for abortion rights, LGBTI+ rights, and reproductive justice to promote health service access and bodily autonomy for all. In Zambia and elsewhere, such activism and coalition building merit greater attention and support.

This article proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the contemporary emergence of neofascist forms of political identification. While much of the literature on democratic erosion has emphasised concepts like populism, institutional decline, or leadership dynamics, the sociological processes that render subjects receptive to neofascist identification remain insufficiently theorised. The article argues that these processes are linked to a broader erosion of normative universality that historically structured modern democratic coexistence. Through a conceptual reconstruction grounded in social theory, it identifies a series of mechanisms through which the weakening of shared normative frameworks enables the consolidation of exclusionary political identities. By shifting the focus from institutional transformations to processes of subjectivation, the article seeks to contribute to a sociological understanding of the conditions under which neofascist mobilisation becomes politically viable in the 21st century.

Performing Waste offers groundbreaking insights into the vibrant interdisciplinary field of waste studies through the lens of performance and artistic practice. This pioneering collection examines how waste and wasting are performed across diverse media and genres, from Afrofuturist musical works to contemporary scrap art installations. Distinguished international scholars present original research using situated methodologies, including ethnographic approaches, to analyse compelling case studies that span global contexts. The volume explores eco-trauma and toxic kinship in artistic works, investigates the relationship between extractivism and knowledge production, and examines critical sites like the Polish-Belorussian border and e-waste processing in Ghana and Peru. By reframing familiar environmental narratives and introducing novel perspectives on waste agency, materiality, and performance, the collection challenges conventional understandings of our discarded materials and practices. Each contribution illuminates how waste performance can help us reimagine ecological relationships and envision alternative futures beyond extractivist paradigms. This volume is an essential reading for students and scholars in environmental humanities, posthumanist theory, decolonial studies, eco-arts, media studies, and performance studies, as well as anyone concerned with creative responses to our global waste crisis.

In this debate piece, we examine representations of postmenopausal motherhood in print media and online content of private clinics in India to show how the visual vocabulary of assisted reproductive technology (ART) reifies patriarchal logics of motherhood through a dance of science and spectacle. In particular, we draw on Franklin’s (2013a) notion of ‘embryo watching’ and Thompson’s (2005) ‘ontological choreography’ to argue how biomedical imaging technologies curate embodied encounters of ART and local-moral worlds where gerontological reproductive futures can be imaged and imagined. Crucially, we illuminate the ambivalent biopolitics of this (media) framing, where older women’s bodies are simultaneously expressed through the promissory language of fertility and an erasure of sexuality. Ultimately, keeping in mind the current decade (2021–2030) as one focused on determinants of healthy ageing, this article sheds light on the policy blind spot of a persistent neglect of the sexual and reproductive health of older women in India.